1. The availability depends on the number of peers like BitTorrent? If so, and if no seed is available, how does one access the content, esp in the context of an intranet?
2. Any change to how we run infrastructure except not serving HTTP?
The usual solutions proposed to fix number 1 is to pay someone to host your content. So basically as before but with the added chattyness and overhead of a p2p protocol.
IMO Filecoin is the most potentially revolutionary thing to come out of the IPFS space, and it or something like it may have impacts that extend beyond keeping content distributed. We badly need a safe, self-organizing, apparently-persistent storage mechanism.
What if a "universal basic income" meant "get paid for sharing your excess disk space"? This could even be made transparent similar to OS page caches, and then everyone with a computer + internet connection would be a participant.
It's not like you upload something to the swarm then disconnect your own server and hope people will forever seed. The swarm is a backup and load balancer. You (or some hosting provider you pay) should still be the main seeder of your own content.
There are services like www.eternum.io (which I wrote) which you can pay to seed your content. Those ensure that it'll stay up even if some of your content is not very popular.
The one huge advantage of content-addressing over location-addressing (= URL with domain name and path) is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working.
Anyone can help out by keeping a copy. With location-addressing additional copies of the content aren't just largely hidden, they also get into a weird mode of competition with the original URL. With content-addressing, additional copies instead forge stronger resilience.
> is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working
No, the original source is still the one solely responsible, unless there's some agreement between parties to cache content for them.
Anyone can help, yes, but it's not their responsibility to keep content online unless there's some agreement between the original content source and other nodes, which is of course not the case by default.
Content-addressing doesn't alleviate the problem 100%, since content can still fall off the network - but it improves the structure of the network in a way that makes it tremendously easier to keep content around. You don't need control over the original domain name to help in distributing a certain piece of content.
This guy combined IPFS and Steem. He uses the Steem reward system to split payment between the content uploader and storage host 75/25. There is a cost, but this guy figured out a way to sustainably host videos in a p2p environment.
> The availability depends on the number of peers like BitTorrent? If so, and if no seed is available, how does one access the content, esp in the context of an intranet?
There's a concept called pinning which keeps files available in a local share. You can pay other people to keep it pinned for a long amount of time, and they usually charge for the size of the file.
1. The availability depends on the number of peers like BitTorrent? If so, and if no seed is available, how does one access the content, esp in the context of an intranet?
2. Any change to how we run infrastructure except not serving HTTP?